There are certain hobbies and life missions that simply do not make any sense to me and I refuse to endorse them. One of them is ropeless, free solo rock-climbing up enormous rocks.
Well, one bloke has absolutely nailed one of the biggest challenges of that particular utterly suicidal hobby. 31-year-old Alex Honnold has free-soloed El Capitan, the famous rock in Yosemite National Park which you might remember as the default desktop background on your MacBook at some point.
Yes. It is large.
So stoked to realize a life dream today 🙂 @jimmy_chin photo https://t.co/Dy27lULfKY
— Alex Honnold (@AlexHonnold) June 4, 2017
The absolute madman scaled the 2,900 foot pathway up the sheer face of the cliff in just under four hours, sans rope. The Guardian reported on his climb with a truly terrifying, evocative sentence which has made me crap my dacks sitting comfortably in my office chair:
At multiple points on the route, Honnold was obliged to make off-balance moves on widely spaced holds the width of raisins, with hundreds, and then thousands, of feet of air beneath him.
“Alex was on fire,” fellow climber Tommy Caldwell told National Geographic. “I’ve never seen him climbing so well.”
Hannold divulged to Nat Geo what some of his preparations were:
Years ago, when I first mentally mapped out what it would mean to free solo Freerider, there were half a dozen of pitches where I was like: ‘Oh, that’s a scary move and that’s a really scary sequence, and that little slab, and that traverse.’There were so many little sections where I thought ‘Ugh – cringe.’ But in the years since, I’ve pushed my comfort zone and made it bigger and bigger until these objectives that seemed totally crazy eventually fell within the realm of the possible.
One day I hope to get to the point where I can stare at hundreds of metres of sheer drop into certain death and say “Uh, cringe!”
No thanks.
Source: The Guardian.
Photo: Facebook.
